Despite many shared goals, the computational linguistics (“CL”) and information retrieval (“IR”) communities have remained somewhat separate with surprisingly little cross-fertilization between the two. There are a number of ways to explain the sociological divide. One community is theory-oriented while the other is engineering-oriented; or perhaps among computational linguists there is still some residue of Avram Noam Chomsky's (well known in the academic and scientific community as the father of modern linguistics) distrust of statistics-based approaches. Whatever the reasons for the divide, from the perspective of the IR community the insights of CL are in many respects an untapped resource. If this divide can be bridged, opportunities arise for subjecting standard tenets of IR to a critical re-evaluation based on what is know from CL, and from this, IR can benefit. Some of these CL insights may be found in a variety of areas, such as, morphology, translation, and semantics, to name a few. Proper consideration of Information Theory—integral to CL—may throw light on many different aspects of IR.